from the hotel. "I saw that you were disheartened, and I told him to speak to you kindly."

"Did you? Ah-I am sorry he needed telling."

"I know his character so well already," said Randal," that I flatter myself I can always keep things between you as they ought to be. What an excellent man!"

"The best man in the world," cried Frank, heartily; and then, as his accents drooped, " yet I have deceived him. I have a great mind to go back-"

"And tell him to give you twice as much money as you had asked for. He would think you had only seemed so affectionate in order to take him in. No, no, Frank-save-lay by economise; and then tell him that you have paid half your own debts. Something high-minded in that."

"So there is. Your heart is as good as your head. Good night." "Are you going home so early? Have you no engagements ?" "None that I shall keep." "Good night, then."

They parted, and Randal walked into one of the fashionable clubs. He neared a table, where three or four young men (younger sons, who lived in the most splendid style, heaven knew how) were still over their wine.

Leslie had little in common with these gentlemen; but he forced his nature to be agreeable to them, in consequence of a very excellent piece

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of worldly advice given to him by Audley Egerton. "Never let the dandies call you a prig," said the statesman. Many a clever fellow fails through life, because the silly fellows, whom half a word well spoken could make his claqueurs, turn him into ridicule. Whatever you are, avoid the fault of most reading men: in a word, don't be a prig!"

"I have just left Hazeldean," said Randal-"what a good fellow he is!" "Capital," said the honourable George Borrowwell. "Where is

he?"

"Why, he is gone to his rooms. He has had a little scene with his father, a thorough, rough country squire. It would be an act of charity if you would go and keep him company, or take him with you to some place a little more lively than his own lodgings."

"What! the old gentleman has been teasing him?-a horrid shame! Why, Frank is not expensive, and he will be very rich-eh?"

"An immense property," said Randal," and not a mortgage on it; an only son," he added, turning away.

Among these young gentlemen there was a kindly and most benevolent whisper, and presently they all rose, and walked away towards Frank's lodgings.

"The wedge is in the tree," said Randal to himself, "and there is a gap already between the bark and the wood."

Harley L'Estrange is seated beside Helen at the lattice-window in the cottage at Norwood. The bloom of reviving health is on the child's face, and she is listening with a smile, for Harley is speaking of Leonard with praise, and of Leonard's future with hope. "And thus," he continued, "secure from his former trials, happy in his occupation, and pursuing the career he has chosen, we must be content, my dear child, to leave him."

"Leave him!" exclaimed Helen, and the rose on her cheek faded.

Harley was not displeased to see

her emotion. He would have been disappointed in her heart if it had been less susceptible to affection.

"It is hard on you, Helen," said he, "to separate you from one who has been to you as a brother. Do not hate me for doing so. But I consider myself your guardian, and your home as yet must be mine. We are going from this land of cloud and mist, going as into the world of summer. Well, that does not content you. You weep, my child; you mourn your own friend, but do not forget your father's. I am alone, and often sad, Helen; will you not comfort

and drudges, and debates, and helps to govern the empire in which the sun never sets. Poor Sun, how tired he must be-but not more tired than the Government! And Randal Leslie has an excellent place in the bureau of a minister, and is looking to the time when he shall resign it to come into Parliament, and on that large arena turn knowledge into power. And meanwhile, he is much where he was with Audley Egerton; but he has established intimacy with the Squire, and visited Hazeldean twice, and examined the house and the map of the property-and very nearly fallen a second time into the Ha-ha, and the Squire believes that Randal Leslie alone can keep Frank out of mischief, and has spoken rough words to

his Harry about Frank's continued extravagance. And Frank does continue to pursue pleasure, and is very miserable, and horribly in debt. And Madame di Negra has gone from London to Paris, and taken a tour into Switzerland, and come back to London again, and has grown very intimate with Randal Leslie; and Randal has introduced Frank to her; and Frank thinks her the loveliest woman in the world, and grossly slandered by certain evil tongues. And the brother of Madame di Negra is expected in England at last; and what with his repute for beauty and for wealth, people anticipate a sensation; and Leonard, and Harley, and Helen? Patience-they will all reappear.

WE were listening one evening, rather listlessly, as people sometimes do to an old friend's narrative of business and family arrangements, when the equal current of such talk was somewhat disturbed by the words'My brother's new partner in the business at Wellington, Hoani Riri Tamihana, a very respectable man, and well connected in the Ngatiawa." This nomenclature was out of the usual way, and was suggestive of inquiry. Our friend was quite open and communicative at first, though some of the company did at last drive him into disagreeable corners. He remembered Hoani Riri when he and his brother became first acquainted with him; he wore a cakahoo or mat dress, had his patoo-patoo in his hand, and was distinguished by several rows of beads made of the bones of fingers and toes, highly polished, and arranged row after row with a graduated symmetry which indicated a very accurate taste. There was no reason why a New Zealander might not get rid of such decorations, and sit on a three-legged stool as composedly as our own countrymen when they have cast off their scarlet coats and white cords; but there was a feature of his early independent life which still stuck to Hoani Riri, and our friend was rather annoyed in

having to admit it. He was tatooed. It was clear that this incurable relic of the state of society in which he had spent his youth was considered by his partner's brother a great inconvenience to him. It prevented himwith all his acuteness, said to be remarkable, and his business habits, pronounced as steady and imperturbable-from being able effectively to represent "the house" in this country. Among Parsees, and other Orientals, we have odd enough names put to very discountable and acceptable paper. Moreover, heads of houses and directors of companies will respectfully meet occasionally with a dusky, stately, bearded and turbaned worshipper of the Prophet, or of anything else; but a man whose skin people have taken the liberty of tatooing!-it would not be easy to get clerks and cashkeepers to admit his superiority and importance. There would be a difficulty in cashing his check, even though his presence offered the best possible means of showing its genuineness, since the signature is a tracing of the pattern of the tatoo.

But there was another little matter in Hoani Riri's personal history, to which fastidious people would find it still more difficult to reconcile themselves, and which indeed might be

counted an insurmountable bar to his ever being received in good society in this country, or making an eligible matrimonial connection. He had in his younger days been addicted to human flesh; and, being a very candid and really high-minded man, he admits that, though he has now acquired totally different tastes, the relish with which he partook in cannibal feastsespecially when the fleshy part of a young female was served up-is still a matter of by no means disagreeable recollection to him.

In this part of the conversation we were slightly startled by a physiological friend, who broke into it somewhat vehemently, maintaining that he considered the cannibalism of the New Zealanders now authenticated beyond all question-to be a remarkable indication of their capacity to become a great civilised people. As this was by no means a self-evident proposition, the physiologist was asked for his reasons, which we shall abbreviate thus: Take a map of the world, and see how distant New Zealand is from the rest of society-if it may so be termed from the clustering continents and islands of the world over which man and the brute and vegetable creation have gradually spread. If we suppose it to be from Central Asia, or from any other specified part of the world, that the present forms of animal and vegetable life first radiated, we may trace their dispersal, by easy gradations, to the extremities of the rest of the known portions of the globe-to the southern capes of Africa and America--to Borneo and Guinea, and even to Australia. But the New Zealand islands are twelve hundred miles distant from the nearest shore, and that nearest shore is the thinly peopled and almost sterile Australia. Now we can imagine that, while an adventurous race of men-the New Zealanders are believed to be of Malay origin-might overcome so great a difficulty, and establish themselves in these beautiful islands, they would not be accompanied by a like infusion of the animal and the vegetable world. Accordingly, we find the fact precisely in accordance with the supposition. Of indigenous quadrupeds there is scarcely one in New Zealand so large as a house rat. The

very few birds found by the earliest European explorers, though some of them had fine plumage, presented no more edible substantiality than a street sparrow. The fruit and vegetable department was equally meagre

there was really almost nothing to support life but an edible fern. Now observe how the poor, abject, in every way inferior race, found scattered round the edge of the great Australian continent, acted in circumstances nearly similar-for there, also, indigenous animals and vegetables suitable for food are rare. They lived on fern roots and cobra worms, with an occasional opossum; and all travellers have remarked, that they manage to preserve themselves from such sources merely in existence, on the border of annihilation, and are consequently a wretched and spiritless race. But your New Zealander, determined to keep up his physical condition, and finding that there was nothing else for it, made a virtue of the necessity of eating his kind-" and in fact," continues our friend, who seemed to have got on a strange hobby, "the cannibal propensity is deeper in the highest conditioned races of man than most people imagine. Why was pork, for instance, prohibited to the Jews and other Oriental nations, of strong physical temperament and appetite? Why, but that it so closely resembles human flesh that people in a state of semibarbarism might get into the habit of overlooking the distinction, and lapse into cannibalism. It was as well to have a barrier against a system of living which would be so obviously deleterious a feature in society, and the obsta principiis principle was adopted."

But, without acceding to our physiological friend's peculiar specu-lations, there seems to be something extremely curious and interesting in finding that our colonists have for the first time come in contact with elements of progressive civilisation capable of keeping pace with our own; in hearing of savages with whom our blood may mix without deterioration, and detecting in very cannibalism a people destined to so proud a destiny as to share, with the heirs of the highest civilisation, one of the fairest portions of the surface of the earth.

The New Zealander is, in fact, the first savage who, after giving battle to the civilised man, and being beaten -as the savage must ever be-has frankly offered to sit down beside us, and enjoy with us the fruits of mutual civilisation. A temperate healthy climate, suitable to a highly conditioned race, was necessary to the development of such a phenomenon. The British race do not spread at all, or spread very scantily, in tropical countries, where the question of superiority of race is at once settled by the hardy European degenerating so as to be in a generation or two inferior to the aboriginal inhabitant. In North America, however, we found a race inhabiting territories where our own people are capable of the fullest development, yet where the aborigines have baffled all efforts at civilisation and improvement. It is the same in the temperate territories of Northern Africa; Hottentots, Kaffirs, Zoolusall were capable of making some slight advance; but all stopped short, and showed themselves unfit to partake in the great destinies of the British race. The aborigines of Australia, though there may be some differences between tribes a thousand or two miles from each other-as between those of Moreton Bay and the Swan River-are all of an extremely degraded type, both physically and intellectually; and even the most conscientious efforts which have been made, on rare occasions unfortunately, to improve their condition, have ever signally failed. If possible, the nations of Van Diemen's Island were still a lower type of humanity than those of the Australian continent. There is no reason to suppose that these representatives of almost the lowest type of humanity were cannibals, but we have the cannibalism of the bush-ranger convicts attested beyond all doubt to Parliamentary committees. These desperate men, the essence of British criminality, threatened at one time to overpower the law, and establish an independent community in the rocky island to which they were transported. In their cunning and capacity, in their endurance under calamity, and ruthlessness in victory, they had some resemblance to the New Zealanders, whom also they resembled in

having recourse to cannibalism. It is not easy to imagine anything more horrible than the description of two of these monsters of degenerate civilisation, Greenhill and Pierce, who wandered together day after day, each watching his moment for plunging his axe into the skull of the other, while, though each knew his comrade's murderous intention, they were respectively prevented from separating by the hope of a victory and a feast. It is singular enough that thus, at the antipodes, we should have, next door as it were to each other, the barbarism following the departed civilisation of part of an energetic race, bearing so close a resemblance to the barbarism which is evidently, in another race, but the precedent of a state of high civilisation.

Nothing has been more bandied about, between scepticism and credulity, than cannibalism or anthropophagy. Besides what Herodotus says of the Massagetæ and other tribes, who ate their relatives by way of burial, there have been through all ages charges of this kind, which are purely fabulous; and few believe Purchas's account of those Africans who exposed human flesh ready for sale at all times, in well-kept booths or shambles, though he gives it on the credit of "John Battell of Essex, a near neighbour of mine, and a man worthy of credit." The discredit found to attach to the old traveller's stories about the Peruvians rearing offspring for the table, and the Saracens, who paid large sums for sucking Christian babes, made people disbelieve in any such practice as systematic anthropophagy, though it was generally admitted that miserable beings, half maddened by starvation and hardship, had sometimes forgotten their nature, and devoured their kind, under impulses that rendered them no more accountable for what they did than the most confirmed madman.

The history of New Zealand, however, places on record the fact of a people indulging in systematic cannibalism, accompanied in recent times with the interesting fact, that the systematic cannibal has been found capable of a high civilisation. Cooke took pains to prove the existence of the practice, both by inquiry and